Raunchy Tales of the City proves to be funny

TV Feature

Published 5:30 am, Saturday, May 5, 2001

Armistead Maupin
is at the door with
Armistead Maupin's Further Tales of the City
. For these tales, suspend credibility and lock the kiddies out of the TV room.

All rules of TV movie propriety are off.

Maupin's Tales of the City has come a long way since the British-made production of it premiered on PBS back in the age of TV innocence. That tale of San Francisco's late-blooming flower-child lifestyle set off a storm of controversy over its treatment of nudity, drug use and homosexuality. But it also won a Peabody, rave reviews, and an Emmy nomination or two.

When PBS chose discretion over the chance to do a sequel, Maupin's More Tales of the City went to Showtime in 1998. By then, such controversial thrills were par for pay cable's course.

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Showtime is now doing Further Tales of the City, in four hours, one a week, starting Sunday. Maupin wrote the TV script, and this time, it looks as if he's determined to outdo even HBO's Sopranos in the sex department.

Showtime describes it as "racy." Gratuitous and explicit are more like it. Get set for Sex and the City by the Bay.

Gay sex is the shocker/grabber, with plenty of full-frontal peeks at the participants. Once and Again'sBilly Campbell jumps aboard that busy love boat in the altogether. But there's a little something for the straight voyeurs, too. Laura Linney goes topless for a bedroom tussle and R&R in a watery think tank.

Even a priest gets into the act, but Father Paddy, at least, is allowed to hide behind the bushes in Golden Gate Park.

The tangled web that this tale's capricious plotlines weave makes you wonder what Maupin had been smoking when he wrote the book on which this miniseries is based.

Further Tales picks up in 1981 -- "Hello, Mayor Feinstein," and hey, on TV, there's the royal wedding of Charles and Diana. It's four years after the last Tales left off, and most of the same major cast members still reside at 28 Barbary Lane.

San Francisco is still home base, but this over-the-edge caper takes a few important side trips -- for an all-male house party in Hollywood; a fateful cruise to Sitka, Alaska; and a bush-plane chase to a Russian-owned island in Arctic waters. All scenes are filmed on location.

Olympia Dukakis is back to play Anna Madrigal, 28 Barbary Lane's landlady and den mother. Her apartment building hasn't changed. It's a regular rabbit hutch of sexual desires, disappointments and surprising developments.

Anna is about to have an unexpected visit from Mother (Jackie Burroughs), the 91-year-old madam of a Nevada brothel. Anna is the product of a sex-change operation. That secret is already out, of course. But there's another deep, dark secret about Anna, and this one, not even Anna knows yet.

Paul Hopkins is back as Michael Tolliver, whose broken heart over departed lover Dr. Jon Fielding (Campbell) has him looking for love with all the wrong people and in all the wrong (and some very seamy) places. His on-camera conquests include a cop, a cowboy and a matinee-idol movie star. The third affair is interrupted, not soon enough, by a visit from a first lady, name of Nancy.

The good news is, Linney is back as Mary Ann Singleton, because in this tale, the girl from Cleveland is growing up fast, and the time has come to test her mettle. She passes with honors.

Mary Ann can't decide whether to marry her neighbor-lover Brian (Whip Hubley) or go for her equally consuming desire to be a big TV news reporter. She's about to fall into a story that could win her that gold ring -- if the sexy anchorwoman (Sandra Oh of Arli$$) doesn't break out of her basement prison at 28 Barbary Lane before airtime.

It's some story, all right.

The rich old Mrs. Halcyon (Diana Leblanc), widow of Mary Anne's former boss, is in a sad state since her daughter DeDe and her two grandchildren drank Jim Jones' cyanide-loaded Kool-Aid at Jonestown. She's convinced they're still alive, and she's right.

When a piercing-eyed fellow named Luke (Henry Czerny) takes squatter's rights to a shack in Golden Gate Park, the plot thickens to incredulity. And a newspaper society columnist, Prue Giroux (Mary Kay Place), gives it an explosive stir-up when she takes Luke along on that cruise to Alaska.

To tell more would spoil Maupin's raunchy comedy-drama. It's highly inventive, to say the least, and frequently very funny.

Further Tales doesn't need voyeurism and overindulgence to make this tall, tall tale a ripper. It would have earned a positive grade without it.